SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 27 July 2024
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Arthur C Clarke Award
This award has been given since 1987 for the best sf novel whose UK first edition was published during the previous calendar year, and consists of an inscribed bookend and a sum of money from a grant initially donated by Arthur C Clarke. In 2001 the prize money – until then a constant £1000 – was increased to £2001 as a gesture to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); it has since risen by ...
Dante, Joe
(1946- ) US film-maker. Originally a fan writer, Dante entered the film industry working for Roger Corman's New World in the trailers department, making Filipino movies look more exciting by inserting stock shots of exploding helicopters. His first feature, codirected with Allan Arkush, was Hollywood Boulevard (1976), a brisk and breezy Satire on low-budget schlock movies featuring many cameo ...
Novum
In his important early work of sf theory, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979), Yugoslav-born Professor Darko Suvin situated sf as a literary form as marked by two unusual devices: Cognitive Estrangement and the Novum. The former is distinctive in creating and understanding the imagined world as different from our own, by means of scientific observation, theorizing and empirical experiment. Such ...
Eliot, George F
(1894-1971) US naval correspondent for the Columbia Broadcasting System and author of stories, usually adventure tales though some are supernaturals, in magazines circa 1920s-1956; some are horror. The Purple Legion: A G-Man Thriller (1936) is of only moderate sf interest, but demonstrates some skill at a period when the concept of the Superhero was in flux, making it hard to fix the generic implications of tales like this. [JC]
Lady and the Monster, The
Film (1944). Republic Pictures. Produced and directed by George Sherman. Written by Dane Lussier, Frederick Kohner, based on Donovan's Brain (1943) by Curt Siodmak. Cast includes Richard Arlen, Sidney Blackmer, Vera Ralston and Erich von Stroheim. 86 minutes. Black and white. / This is the first of the three film versions of Siodmak's novel; the others are Donovan's Brain (1953) and ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...